Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Dangling A Proposition

Now here’s where this little tale takes a very odd twist. It was getting near time for me to leave Mona’s house. We’d been holed up in her bedroom for more than three hours having an energetic workout when I asked her what had happened to cause the falling out between her and Sharon and Sharon’s older sister-- Mona's long time friend. I shouldn’t have gotten into it. It wasn’t as though it was eating away at me. I didn’t really care. It was just conversation towards the end of an extremely intimate evening.

“Well, it involved Chet, and, umm, it was a big mess,” she said.Chet was the older guy (about 10 years older than me) that Mona had gone on the blind date with when we were all in Louisville back in August. I knew he had stayed in the picture, at least for a while, because Mona had a box of joints on her cocktail table that she said came from Chet.

Once again, I should have just left it alone.

But I told her she couldn’t leave the story at that.

“Chet and I kept seeing each other… but you know how long a drive it is… anyway, he’d come up here and spend the weekend… ya know, once or twice a month. Just having fun… nothing serious,” she said.The thought of the two of them having fun all weekend in her bedroom didn’t kill me, but it didn’t make me grin either. I didn’t have the illusion that we were doing anything but fucking around—after all, we’d never even gone out for dinner or a movie. We'd never been out together on a date. Still, it was a visual I didn’t need.

“OK. But how does that turn into a big mess with…”“Back around the holidays I drove down there a couple times. Hung out at his place. It was cool, but I hated driving down there by myself in the winter. Anyway, you remember that he works where she does, right?” she said.“Yeah,” I said.“Well, somehow she found out from somebody at work that I’d been in Louisville without telling her I was in town… which was probably bad, not telling her, I mean, I can see why she got pissed, but I was going there to see Chet and, well, we decided it would be better to not spend the whole weekend hanging out with other friends.”“Sure,” I thought, “that would cut into sucking and fucking time.”

I was really wishing I hadn’t brought the topic up for pillow talk.

“I guess some guy he worked with asked him what he had done over the weekend and he told him that I had been down for the weekend, and…”I could just imagine that conversation…. "Chet, what did you do this weekend? I did this chick from _____ all fucking weekend that's what I did, pal.”

I needed to get my imagination in check or I was never going to have fun with Mona again.

“Well, I guess that guy told somebody else and soon enough it got around to her. She called me, really mad, which pissed me off, and we just got into everything that we hated about each other… and we haven’t talked since.” She got quiet. I felt like shit for bringing it up-- it was making her sad, and it wasn't doing me a world of good either.

“Wow, uh, that’s too bad, Mona. You guys went back a long ways. Sorry that happened. I guess Sharon took her sister’s side,” I said.“I was already mad at her anyway, the way she fucked you over completely pissed me off,” she said.I kept quiet. So did Mona. We were up against each other, completely naked, under a top sheet.

After a while Mona broke the silence. “So, you’re going back to school Sunday afternoon?”“Yeah. I’ll leave in the middle of the afternoon.”“I want to ask you something and I hope you don’t freak out,” she said.That’s a preamble you don’t necessarily want to hear. Then again, it doesn’t have to mean something bad is coming next.“Chet’s coming up this weekend. He’ll get in late Friday night.”Ooof. That landed like a punch to the gut.

“Ohhh Kayyy… so what’s the question you want to ask?” I figured it was whether that bothered me or not.

Boy, was I wrong.“Well, I wondered if you wanted to come over Saturday night and, ya know, have a party with us,” Mona said.I was speechless for a few beats. Then I said, “I don’t do real well at parties at this house. Besides, I don’t know any of your work friends… and Chet will be here…I mean, I dunno,” I said.

She smiled. “No Wil, it would just be the three of us.”I just stared at her.She rolled onto me pressing her breasts against my chest. She ran her right hand through my hair.“C’mon Wilson. Let's have a party. Just the three of us.”I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I just stared into her eyes which were about five inches from my eyes.